


Archaeidae

by Jsyrin



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Gang members getting assassinated, Gen, General superheroic violence, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Lots of Murder, Multiple Perspectives, Nazis getting murdered, Robot Arms, Slurs, nazis being racist assholes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:21:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 20,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24641581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jsyrin/pseuds/Jsyrin
Summary: A whisper of black. A stain of blood on the wall.A girl gone missing, a family home left empty.Dust in the wind.Chaos in the streets.Hunt and kill.
Comments: 71
Kudos: 395





	1. 1.1

**1.1 Afrarchaea Ansieae**

“Day… thirteen of preliminary testing. All test subjects are secured in their tanks, all tanks are secured to the wall. It was a bitch and a half setting all this up, but it’s worth it.” Conrad Verner spoke calmly into the recorder in his hand, humming a little tune as he began flipping switches on the array of fluid filled tanks. A faint thrum of excitement ran through him- mixed with a hint of anxiety. 

On the one hand, he’d finally managed to develop a stable formula after killing nearly all of his original test subjects- it wasn’t so bad, they were all inferior products anyway, but it was still such a pain to constantly have to go out and kidnap more homeless scum and the various dregs of society. But now that he’d made a stable formula that _wouldn’t_ turn the test subject into a cancer ridden abomination of flesh, or eat through them like fluoroantimonic acid, or explode their heart from the stresses put on their body, he could get into the _real_ testing- the testing that would make him go from a mildly useless Tinker to hopefully Kaiser’s new favorite Cape.

All he had to do was what caused him so much anxiety in the first place.

That is, make a viable supersoldier formula out of his already barely stable base chemical and make enough of it to kit out just about every willing soldier in the E88.

And he had less than a _month_ to do it. In the fucking middle of December. In the goddamn coldass snow filled ass end of the mountains around the city so he wouldn’t get caught digging through scrap yards and all that other shit that got rookie Tinkers kidnapped or murdered.

Hell, he had a few of those idiot kids working on the parts for his equipment already. Too bad he’d have to kill all of ‘em.

He kinda liked Jaina. Real nice tits and ass on that one, despite her being barely seventeen and also a fucking dyke. Shame about her being a dirty sand ni-

“Conrad! New shipment for ya!” a voice called out from the door to his lab, knocking him out of where he’d been standing around for the last couple seconds. 

He cursed under his breath and resumed flipping switches and pressing buttons- activating the auto-drain, making sure patient vitals were steady, preparing all of them for their booster shots to make sure their immune systems wouldn’t explode- etc etc.

“Gimme a sec J!” Conrad called back, his voice echoing through the rough hewn rock of his secret Tinker lab as he wiped his brow, threw on his winter jacket, and strode up the steps to meet Jerry, the guy in charge of making sure he got all his chemicals, parts, and test subjects. 

Silently, he wondered if maybe Kaiser had a soft spot for him since he could bring way more use to the Empire than just crappy Tinker weapons that’d probably explode in a month or so.

“Aight what we got here?” Conrad asked as he thumbed the button for the garage door, letting the flatbed truck wheel its way in and the guys inside the accompanying convoy of pickup trucks to start unloading half of what was tied down- not all of it, since most of it was just supplies to disguise the Tinker shit, but whatever.

“We got two new test subjects- idiots were driving around and crashed. Father daughter pair, dad’s pretty okay but the kid’s a lil fucked up. Both of ‘em white, think the dad’s the guy who keeps stiffin’ Boss Krieg on the DWU side. You might need to get that lil chink assistant of yours to make her some new arms if you can’t save ‘em.” Jerry answered, chuckling as he stepped into the lab and lit a cigarette. “Other than that, couple other hobo niggers who ain’t know their place, couple gooks n’ chinks, couple idiots who thought getting high on their supply was a good idea. Y’know. Usual.”

“Mhmm,” Conrad nodded, lighting his own cigarette and watching as the burly guys unloaded the new captives into the mass stasis pen set into the wall and dumped a few more into the empty tanks- including the pair Jerry pointed out. “Damn, she is _fucked up_.”

“Yup.” 

“Gonna take a loooootta juice to fix her up,” Conrad muttered, grumbling as he took a drag on his cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke and fog. “You sure she’s worth it?”

“Hey, if she dies she’s more meat for the dogs. She makes it through, she’s another soldier for the cause,” Jerry shrugged, lightly punching Conrad on the shoulder. “Stay frosty out here C, I gotta head back.”

“Ha, go fuck yourself Jerry,” Conrad snickered, finishing his cigarette and watching as the rest of the guys finished unloading his supplies and left him all alone, save for the unobtrusive guards stationed around to make sure none of the other Tinkers did anything stupid.

“Alright, let’s get back to work,” he muttered to himself, flicking the tail of his labcoat behind him and sauntered back to his workstation. “Day thirteen, trial number sixty four. Finished making the stabilized base serum but there’s still a lotta work to do. First things first… how do I add super strength to this mix…?”

}}8{{

“YES!” Conrad whooped as he leapt out of his chair, face full of stubble and eyes bleary with sleep deprivation as he beheld his final mix- a perfect blend of traits that would not only make someone an utter _beast_ of a super soldier to the point that they’d qualify as a midtier Brute, but with the mix of nanites in the serum and compulsion arrays built into the tanks, his mix would turn his test subjects into the _perfect soldiers_ . Strong, fast, skilled, and best of all, _utterly loyal to whoever he wanted_.

If he weren’t already well aware of how many people would be gunning for his head if he’d tried to sell his formula, he’d have tried to make a fortune off of it.

As it were, though, he was already down to his two last subjects- all the others had died from their bodies rejecting some component or another, or simply expired after being in stasis just a little too long, but these two… well. He hadn’t wanted to use either of them seeing as one was some homeless cripple with half his foot missing and the other was that teenage girl he’d gotten way back a few weeks ago with her arms nearly cut off at the shoulder. 

He was almost out of assistants at this rate too, all he had left was some scruffy kid who specialized in maintaining other Tinker projects. Worthless for actually building new equipment, but he was at least good for making sure he didn’t _need_ new equipment.

Shame about Jaina, though. He would have at least liked to stick it in her once or twice just to hear her scream, but…

Eh. Whatever.

“This is Conrad Verner, day… christ, what day is it? Day twenty nine. It’s almost the end of January, but I’ve finally made a stable batch. Problem is, these are my only two test subjects. Hopefully, this works.” he spoke into his recorder, pouring his perfected serum into the injection vials in each tank and beginning the activation process.

Both tanks rumbled, the greenish fluid inside bubbling and almost frothing near the top as the oxygenated liquid began to glow, the tanks pumping nearly lethal doses of strange radiation into the bodies of his test subject. 

Conrad bit his lip and watched, bouncing on his heels as the injection process began in full. Nanites swirled around inside each vial of serum, causing iridescent patterns to emerge in the crimson fluid- his sleep deprived mind almost made him think of blood, though it wasn’t quite the right color or viscosity.

He stared in awe, watching as the bodies of his two test subjects mutated and bulged out- the homeless cripple thrashing in his restraints on sheer instinct as his unconscious body twisted and filled out, muscle growing and wounds healing. The girl, though, seemed all too still. She twitched lightly as her new frame filled out, slower than the hulking brute the man was becoming- was it because of the robotic arms she’d been fitted with interfering with the process?

Conrad couldn’t tell- though he could tell that on both test subjects their bodies had healed the scars that both of them had, and even managed to completely regenerate the man’s foot all on its own. And that it was subtly changing the girl’s figure slightly- well, if things worked out alright maybe he could have some fun with-

_WARNING. TEST SUBJECT 01 VITALS DESTABILIZING_

Conrad almost choked as the lights in the lab immediately flashed red, a warning klaxon blaring as the male test subject began thrashing in his tank- not the twitching and writhing of an uncomfortable experience, but the thrashing of a dying man trying to escape his agonizing death.

He looked on in shock as the man continued to thrash around, mouth gaping open in a soundless scream before the test subject _snapped through his restraints_ and slammed his fists into the glass, eyes flying wide open for a brief moment before his body seized up and just…

Stopped.

Conrad blinked slowly as the man died, blood oozing out of every orifice as his muscles began shrinking down and his bowels emptied into the tank.

“Shit, that’s not good,” he sighed, running his hand through his hair- at least, on the other hand, the other test subject seemed to be doing fine. Even better, actually, since she was far more calm about her body changing and mutating in ways nature had never intended.

Still, he bit his lip and watched carefully as the transformation continued- progress continued ticking up and up, vitals holding stable until-

_PHYSICAL ENHANCEMENT COMPLETE_.

“Oh thank god,” Conrad breathed out, rubbing his chest as he slumped down into his chair and tried to calm himself down. “Smooth sailing from here.”

He grinned to himself and stood up, tapping the glass of the tank and almost leering at his new, naked supersoldier. “You’re gonna win me the big bucks, lil girl. Almost a shame Kaiser’s probably gonna want you all for himself otherwise I’d take you for a ride.”

He chuckled and turned away, lighting up a cigarette as he heard the computer begin the subject’s mental conditioning. All he had to do now… was wai-

Stars. Darkness. Infinite fractals spiraling through space.

Contact.

Conrad Verner slumped to the floor, dazed.

He never felt the fist that crushed his skull into the floor.


	2. 1.2

**1.2 Afrarchaea Bergae**

“Haven’t seen Taylor in a while,” Emma murmured quietly as she and Sophia sat together at lunch, sipping out of a juicebox and humming to herself. “I went to her house but there’s no sign of her- I think my dad said something about a missing persons report a few weeks ago.”

“Hmph, probably jumped off a pier or something, then,” Sophia snorted, rolling her eyes as she picked at her rather meager selection of what the Winslow cafeteria generously described as ‘food’. “What do we care, anyway? She’s dead, you’re not. You’re strong, she’s weak and you’ll never have to deal with her dragging you down ever again.”

“You’re right, but it still feels… anticlimactic,” Emma shrugged, not even remotely concerned anymore after mulling it over in her head. “Anyway, what are we even gonna do now? It’s not like she’s ever gonna show up anymore now so…”

“We _could_ just… do normal school stuff?” Madison deadpanned at Emma, flicking her hair over her shoulder and huffing. “It’s not like we really need to do much else anymore. The rest of all the girls can just go do their own thing now anyway.”

“Oh Maddy, Maddy, Maddy,” Emma sighed, rubbing her forehead and frowning. “If we just all of a sudden _stop_ , that means we’ve lost steam. It means that we can’t keep going anymore. And do you know what happens to a predator that stops hunting?”

“... I get the feeling that I’m not gonna like what you’re about to say next, but sure, go ahead,” Madison sighed, starting to feel like maybe, just maybe, lumping herself in with these two psychos was a bad idea.

“If a predator stops hunting, it _dies,_ ” Sophia answered, clenching her fist and lightly pounding it against the table for emphasis. “So. We either lose our status if we go too long without proving we’re still on top. _Or_ . We find someone new to _hunt_.”

“Y’know, as much as that makes sense, do you really have to phrase it like that? Can’t we literally just say we’re picking a new bitch to mess with or something? You sound like some kind of Disney villain when you phrase it like that,” Madison rolled her eyes, tapping out a few messages on her phone to a few group chats- gossip about girls that were less popular, lesser in status. Had to keep the hangers on in check, after all.

As she did so, though, something caught her eye- a news article dated to just before the end of winter break. Barely two days ago.

“Hey guys? Have you uh, heard the news lately?” Madison spoke up again, cutting through whatever psycho whispers that Emma and Sophia were cooking up between them (or were they just flirting with each other? They did kind of have that vibe going on, albeit in a way that made Madison think of those creepy japanese comics with the psycho obsessive girl chasing and murdering her love interest. Except in this case _both_ of them were the psycho obsessive girl and they were chasing each other?) as she held up her phone and displayed the article. “Cuz someone sent this link to the group chat a few minutes ago. Apparently there was this big explosion outside of town, and the news says the Protectorate got involved, even.”

“Yeah, I heard,” Sophia muttered, frowning at the phone in her face and looking for all the world like she’d rather be talking about anything else. “What about it?”

“I dunno, I’m just wondering what it’s all about. Maybe there was a big cape fight or something?” Madison shrugged, flipping her phone back around and tapping away again, while Emma and Sophia just exchanged looks with each other.

The three of them sat in silence for another few moments before Emma spoke up, idly stacking her empty juice box on top of her tray and looking quite disinterested. “Rachel.”

“What about her?” Madison asked.”

“Heard she’s been doing tricks behind the gym lately,” Emma continued on, her voice raised just loud enough that anyone sitting at the other tables could hear snippets of her words. “Think she’s low on cash or trying to fuel an addiction?”

Madison blinked and snapped her fingers, immediately catching on. “Maybe it’s both. You know, maybe that’s how she affords all her stuff. I mean really, come _on_ . Her daddy definitely doesn’t make enough money to afford all _that_.”

“Bitch keeps strutting around like she owns the place too,” Sophia muttered, standing up and dumping her tray in the garbage. “Maybe we oughta knock her down a peg or two, yeah?”

The three girls laughed as they left the cafeteria right as the bell rang, already conspiring to make a new person’s life into an absolute hell.

}}8{{

“So… what _really_ happened out there?” Emma asked as school let out and both she and Sophia snuck out behind the school building for privacy.

“Dunno, it looked like a Tinker lab blew up,” Sophia shrugged, combing her fingers through her hair and sitting down. “There were a lotta corpses with bullet holes in ‘em too, and some kind of… mutant corpse in a tank. One guy with a skull crushed flatter than a pancake. Nothing recoverable either- all the equipment was either blown sky high or just completely shredded apart. Lotta evidence that, whoever the Tinker was, they were doing human experiments.”

“... They’re dead now, though, right?” Emma murmured, eyes widening as a shiver of fear ran down her spine at the thought of some random cape kidnapping people to do horrible experiments on them.

“Probably,” Sophia nodded, pursing her lips as she thought back to the information she’d managed to sneak out of Carlos. “We think that the crushed skull guy was the Tinker, and that whatever he made, he couldn’t control. We’re also pretty sure he was Empire anyway, so fuck him.”

“Well, getting rid of a dangerous Empire Tinker can only be a good thing, I guess,” Emma shrugged and tapped her fingers against her knee, trying to think of what to say. “... So… what made the explosion anyway?”

Sophia shrugged in response, lifting her hands up with the motion and letting them fall into the dirt. “Who knows? Who or whatever it was was _brutal_ , though. Some of the pics were… messy, to say the least. There was a set of tire tracks leading back to the main road, but nobody’s managed to figure out where they went.”

“... Well, whoever it is, I hope they’re not another villain,” Emma sighed, shaking her head and watching as Sophia checked her phone and stood up. “Time to go?”

“Time to go,” Sophia nodded, grimacing a little as she shouldered her backpack and headed towards the front of the school where her ride was waiting. “See ya round, survivor.”

“Right back at you, predator,” Emma grinned, waving as she watched Sophia ride away in a plain silver car before stepping on to the bus back home.

Sophia, meanwhile, stared at her phone and grit her teeth, glaring at the screen as she reviewed the documents she’d been sent.

Grisly pictures of nazi skinheads brutally taken down, forensic details revealing that, whatever did it to them, they hadn’t managed to put up much of a fight, if at all. Twenty six murders in less than two days- and the number was growing higher. 

Sophia shivered in a way that had nothing to do with the January chill. 

Something about the situation wasn’t sitting right with her, and it wasn’t just the censored images of blood and gore on her phone. 

She felt like… felt like someone was watching her, even in the back of a car with tinted windows.

Sophia took a breath and tried to calm down enough to read through the rest of the documents. If she had to go into a Wards briefing about what appeared to be some kind of vigilante serial killer who may or may not have been a cape, she might as well read up on them first.

Twenty six murders, all of whom were connected to the E88, or at least suspected in some way. Predominantly male, though there were a few females in the list as well. All white, no shit.

All of fairly upper middle class households, the majority of whom seemed to do some kind of physical labor for Medhall- guys who worked in the warehouses handling medical supplies and unloading trucks. That kind of thing. A few people who worked for the Benson Moving Company, a few people who seemed to be secretaries- the women, at least.

All of them had identifying tattoos somewhere on their body that showed their allegiances- 88s and iron crosses, viking imagery, literal nazi slogans and swastikas, the full works of stuff one might expect to find on a racist fuckbag with more shitty opinions than brain cells.

What was the most shocking thing was that _all of them had been murdered in their homes_ . Which, while that wasn’t so surprising once or twice considering that serial murders happened in Brockton Bay just like everywhere else, the real kicker was that _no one had heard or seen a damn thing_.

Not a single witness to describe a suspicious person, not a single sign of tampered locks or forced entry, not even so much as a footprint out of place.

And yet.

They were dead, most of them decapitated or disemboweled, a few of them with their skulls caved in by blunt force trauma. All across two days.

Sophia would have been impressed if she weren’t slightly horrified at the thought of someone either with _that_ much skill or some kind of powers that let them do such a thing turning away from nazis and attacking innocent people.

Oh who was she kidding, she was entirely impressed, but she at least had to _pretend_ to be horrified in front of that pretentious dickbag Gallant. Why would she be anything _but_ impressed when this single person put an incredibly noticeable dent in the Empire’s forces in two days when the cops struggled to even _convict_ half the unpowered gang members the Protectorate arrested?

Whoever this person was, they were _extremely_ skilled- that, or they were _extremely_ powerful.

Sophia didn’t know which it was- maybe both. Either way… she almost wanted to meet this person they codenamed Phantom, if only to thank them for their services.


	3. 1.3

**1.3 Afrarchaea Cornuta**

There were many things that Victoria wanted to be doing at three in the morning on a Saturday.

Patrolling was not one of them.

Alas, though the siren call of her bed drew her eyes inexorably back in the direction of her own home and the warmth that could be found within, her own sense of duty kept her flying about in the cold, January air. She shivered quietly as she lowered the fashionable and functional set of winter goggles that came with her winter costume, using them to see through the snow and fog that had descended upon the city.

Something stalked the streets of Brockton now, and it wasn’t friendly.

She had known that much, after she’d seen the news. Eighty people dead within the span of five days, all of whom had noted Empire affiliations. Some of them had their entire family killed as well- corpses arranged around a now silent household. Some in their beds, some in the hallways, some in the bathroom.

Still, more of their families had survived, only to wake up screaming in horror at the sight of their dead loved ones. Teenagers strangled in their beds, husbands decapitated next to their wives, wives shot full of holes next to their husbands.

All without anyone noticing, all without anyone finding out until the next day- or maybe not even that.

Victoria would have felt worse about the entire thing, but the dead had all been Empire goons, so she supposed that, at the very least, whoever this psychotic monster was, they at least weren’t killing random people for shits and giggles.

Still, Victoria thought to herself, whoever this ‘Phantom’ was, they were  _ terrifying _ . Not in the same way that Empire capes were scary- theirs was a loud and obvious threat that could be dealt with by punching them in the face or waiting for the PRT to confoam them into the dirt. No, Phantom was terrifying because there was every chance that they might start killing other people as well- after all, they still didn’t have a motive beyond the vague guess that Phantom was going after the Empire as some kind of revenge scheme.

Which, considering the pattern, Victoria figured that was pretty much it, actually.

She was shaken out of her thoughts, though, by a black spot drifting across the streets below- something, or someone, moving across the rooftops with nary a whisper of sound.

“Hey Ames?” she whispered quietly, holding her phone to her ear after dialing her sister. “I think I’ve spotted something.”

_ “Be careful. Is your GPS on?” _

“Yeah, just keep up with me,” Victoria murmured back, putting her phone back into her pocket after making sure that the GPS tracker was functioning so Amy could keep up. She descended slowly, tapping the chest of her costume and shuddering as the entire outfit shifted colors from brilliant white and gold to a mix of deep, midnight blue and dark grays. Her hair, she pulled back into a loose ponytail and tucked into her hood. Thusly camouflaged, she began tracking the fast moving blur of darkness across the streets, taking care to remain high enough that she was camouflaged by the night time clouds, but low enough that she wouldn’t lose the blur in the alleyways or shadows.

As she flew closer, she drew up short and huffed, shaking her head and switching her outfit back to its daylight version as she abandoned stealth entirely, barely remembering to tell Amy it was a false alarm as she dove down.

“Hey! What’re you doing skulking around in the middle of the night?” she called out, narrowly avoiding the reflexive crossbow bolt shot at her by the now visible Shadow Stalker. “Hey! Watch the bolts!”

“Tch, great,” Shadow Stalker muttered under her breath as she roughly holstered her crossbow and stood up straight, cape billowing in the cold wind as Victoria came in for a landing. “I could ask you the same thing,  _ Glory Girl _ . And for the record,  _ I _ was patrolling the area.”

“At three in the morning?” Victoria raised an eyebrow, crossing her arms and looking around. “What, the PRT have you all working emergency shifts or something?”

Shadow Stalker pointedly said nothing, her body language shifting from restless to  _ annoyed _ in a moment as she crossed her arms and glared- not that Victoria could see her eyes, but that stern woman mask she had on her face did wonders for that kind of thing.

Eventually, she shook herself and growled, tapping her heel against the ground. “Couldn’t sleep. Stuff’s got me all worked up.”

Victoria made a small noise of realization and nodded. “The whole uh… Phantom thing, huh?”

“Yeah. Gotta keep a watch on the area- never know when the bastard might show up next,” Shadow Stalker answered, nodding along with Victoria’s words. “You?”

“Same thing, really,” Victoria answered, shrugging. “You’re more talkative than usual, huh?”

“Adrenaline. Or sleep deprivation. Take your pick,” Shadow Stalker shot back, then immediately turned around and kicked her foot against the ground.

Victoria took that to mean it was definitely sleep deprivation on Shadow Stalker’s part- now that she was close, she could definitely see the other heroine shaking slightly, either from the cold, or from exhaustion. “... Maybe you should go-”

Before Victoria could finish her sentence and tell Shadow Stalker to go home, a shot rang out through the night. Something pinged against the rim of the rooftop, barely inches from where Shadow Stalker was standing.

“... Uh oh,” Victoria muttered, looking down at the street and noticing-

“Capes! Kill ‘em!”

-what looked to be a horde of very angry Nazis, all of whom were armed with weapons of various kinds- bats, chains, crowbars, brass knuckles, hunting knives, guns. Hell, Victoria thought she saw a fucking  _ bow and arrow _ on one of them.

“I can take ‘em!” Shadow Stalker immediately announced, diving off the roof in her shadow form before Victoria could react, throwing herself into the fray in a flurry of fists and feet, her crossbow completely forgotten at her side for the time being.

“... I’m gonna be in so much trouble for this…” Victoria sighed, throwing herself after Shadow Stalker with a vicious warcry- if she was gonna be grounded, she was at least gonna keep a fellow hero from getting her ass killed out of sleep deprivation.

“Come and get some!” she shouted, throwing fists left and right, knocking aside weapons and flinging screaming Nazis around the deadened street while Shadow Stalker did her utmost best to phase through the melee weapons and knock out her own assailants. 

Two of the racist shitheads fell as Victoria cracked their skulls together before she turned around and elbowed another one in the face hard enough that she  _ felt _ his nose break under her assault. Shadow Stalker finally remembered her tranq bolts and stabbed another E88 member in the thigh, only to take a bullet to the back before she could phase out again.

She screamed and fell to the ground, barely able to throw herself out of the fight and turn intangible before collapsing into a quickly forming puddle of her own blood.

“Shit!” Victoria spat out, immediately flinging herself over Shadow Stalker as another shot rang out, deflecting off her shield but bringing it down in the process- though at least the ricochet had knocked another guy out of the fight as it embedded itself into his shoulder. 

“All of you stand down!” Victoria roared, ignoring the fact that her shield was down for the moment as she pushed her Aura out as hard as she could, bringing fear down upon the assembled group of Empire goons, making them blubber and scream as they fell to the ground almost sobbing from the sheer force of her wrath.

She almost felt proud of herself as she forced the bastards to the ground, growling the whole time- and then, yet  _ another _ bullet impacted her shield, shattering it as the bullet impacted her foot and bounced off into the street.

“...  _ Really?” _ Victoria growled, glaring at the pale and shaking man on the ground- or rather, the gun he was squeezing in a death grip. She focused her Aura slightly, glaring down at him with all the force of an angry goddess- and immediately flung herself back with a cry of shock as his head suddenly  _ exploded _ into a shower of blood all over the street.

So loud was her scream that she only just barely heard the sound of the gunshot mere moments later, echoing quietly through the street before fading away.

“Wh- who did that!?” Victoria spun around in shock, only for a cloud of smoke to obscure her view with a loud hiss and the clanking of metal against the street. She coughed and sputtered, shutting her eyes and stumbling around until she realized the smoke was… harmless?

Or, at the very least, if it  _ was _ tear gas it wasn’t getting through her shield.

“Come out! I know you’re there!” Victoria called out, floating above the ground and rocketing up until she exited the cloud of smoke, looking around wildly until she realized the entire street was clogged with white, wispy smoke that completely obscured her view.

She heard gurgles from the cloud, screams.

A loud grunt and an aborted scream that sounded not like the gang members she’d just fought, but like  _ Shadow Stalker _ . Who was  _ still in there _ , and  _ was already injured. _

“Dammit!” Victoria hissed and immediately dove back down, slowing down as she entered the cloud so she wouldn’t accidentally land on anyone. “Shadow Stalker! Where are you!?”

“Over here!”

A burst of relief surged through Victoria as she heard Shadow Stalker’s voice, rushing over and finding-

“...”

A  _ person _ . A person dressed in all black, slim and wiry and with no discernable features other than height and build. A person currently holding a knife to Shadow Stalker’s throat with the crook of their leg as they pinned the heroine to the ground with a submission hold… and… 

Applied bandages to her wound?

“... Who… who are you?” Victoria whispered, barely managing to hold herself back at the sight of the knife to Shadow Stalker’s throat, even as the black clad…  _ person _ (hero? villain?) finished wrapping bandages around Shadow Stalker’s torso before immediately dropping the knife (which vanished before it hit the ground?) and leaping back, pushing the heroine to the ground and vanishing into the smoke- right as it finished clearing away.

“... What.” 

Victoria could only stare at where the mystery person had been barely a second ago, dumbfounded at the absolute  _ speed _ of their escape.

  
“... The  _ fuck!?” _ Shadow Stalker wheezed out, the wind driven out of her lungs after being thrown into the ground by the person’s escape. “Was that- was that the fucking Phantom!?”


	4. 1.4

**1.4 Afrarchaea Entabeniensis**

Armsmaster watched impassively as Shadow Stalker recounted the events of the previous night. The girl was… nervous, he thought to himself. On edge, liable to lash out.

No different than normal, but that was to be expected with a record like hers. Though, this time it was more that she was lashing out because she thought she’d be punished for her late night unapproved patrol, rather than her usual surly attitude.

What was of more interest to him at the moment, though, wasn’t her attitude. Rather, it was the way she described Phantom’s actions.

According to Shadow Stalker, the moment she’d been shot was the moment that Phantom had chosen to appear- no one else had noticed, but seeing as the Empire thugs had been focused on Glory Girl and Glory Girl had been facing the wrong direction, it only made sense that Shadow Stalker had been the only one to see the masked serial killer appear on a nearby rooftop. Not simply just walk to the edge nor land there, but simply… _appear_ in a manner that was decidedly unnatural (for normal people, at the very least). And then Phantom had, according to Shadow Stalker, simply stood there until Glory Girl deflected the second bullet into the ground, at which point Phantom had manifested a rifle in her hands, taken aim, and fired with one hand whilst tossing a smoke canister with the other.

That was where the inconsistencies started. For one, although Shadow Stalker had reportedly seen Phantom appear on a rooftop, her mask’s camera saw nothing in the same space she described. That wasn’t so unusual with some Strangers, since it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that a Strange class Parahuman could scrub their own image from electronics. Another one of the inconsistencies was the lack of evidence- there had been no sign of anyone being present on the rooftop when Armsmaster scanned the area a few hours after Shadow Stalker called in the incident. No footprints, no disturbed gravel, not even so much as an unlocked door.

Again, not exactly something out of the ordinary for Strangers or Movers with some kind of flight or teleportation, but still. Then there was the lack of an actual bullet in the ground after Phantom had shot the one Empire member in the head- despite there clearly being a bullet hole and the pattern of destruction matching that of a 0.300 Winchester Magnum cartridge fired from less than a hundred feet away. Armsmaster wasn’t surprised by the lack of bullet- after all, Glory Girl and Shadow Stalker both reported that the knife Phantom had held to Shadow Stalker’s throat vanished moments after Phantom released it. 

And then the smoke canister- Panacea had confirmed that neither Glory Girl nor Shadow Stalker had suffered from smoke inhalation despite being in the cloud for several minutes, nor were there any signs of carcinogens, chemical irritants, or toxic substances in their systems beyond the normal trace amounts found as waste products in the human body. Just like the bullet and the knife, though, the canister vanished without a trace- Shadow Stalker had seen it spewing out smoke, but the moment the cloud vanished, so too did the canister.

All that was left of Phantom’s involvement was an expertly treated bullet wound in Sophia’s side, about eight dead Empire thugs with various knife wounds littering their bodies, and a ninth with the back of his head blown out with a bullet hole in the road to match.

So far, out of all the abilities logged in just that short interaction, Armsmaster had several tentative classifications already rolling through his mind as Shadow Stalker finished her report and slumped back in her chair.

Some kind of Mover ability that was either teleportation or possibly flight due to the speed of both entry and exit. A possible Stranger or Shaker ability that scrubbed evidence of their involvement out of both video footage and the nearby environment. A possible Brute rating, given that Sophia had seen Phantom leap off of the rooftop and land without injury- though that one might be conjecture due to the smoke blocking her view. A Blaster ability, possibly, focused on the generation of weaponry- again, possibly just conjecture since that might have been a possible Shaker ability destroying the weapons so as to scrub away evidence. 

And then, right at the tail end of Shadow Stalker’s debrief, one last comment that sent a slight chill down his spine. 

“When he- she… they, I guess, grabbed me… I mean, I didn’t wanna move anyway since they had me pinned and I had a knife to my throat even though they were keeping me from bleeding out, but…” Sophia rubbed her throat, shuddering a bit at the reminder of her mortality- a single scratch across her neck, healed already by Panacea but still lingering as phantom pain. “I… I don’t think I could use my powers. Something about Phantom touching me just… it wasn’t like my powers were gone, but for some reason I just… it’s like they didn’t want to _respond_.” 

A Striker/Trump classification. A rather low one, thankfully, but a Trump classification nonetheless. 

Armsmaster nodded slowly as Sophia finally wound down from her explanation and was returned to her cell for M/S screening. The amount of abilities shown by Phantom was troubling, but at the same time, possibly weren’t native parahuman abilities but rather some kind of Tinker suit used to confuse and obfuscate Phantom’s true abilities.

He shook his head as he turned around and headed back to his lab. As much as he would have liked to review the footage of Phantom, the fact of the matter was that there wasn’t any footage, though Dragon did manage to pick up some digital blurring in the areas where Sophia had actually managed to pan over the illusive murderer. Unfortunately for both him and Dragon, neither of them were able to actually resolve the blurs into anything other than distorted shadows- useful, vaguely, as it gave a sense of positioning until the smoke clouds obscured the entire area, but not useful in the slightest for gathering any kind of combat data.

Although… there was… _something_ interesting going on with some of the corpses in the area. Or so Dragon had mentioned before he’d gone off to supervise Shadow Stalker’s interview. Now that he had time, though, he reviewed the documents Dragon had forwarded to his private, encrypted inbox.

Eight Empire members scattered around the street- this much was already clear even without forensic investigation. However, there was a pattern to how they died. 

Two of them had died from a knife to the back of the skull, punching through bone along with signs of blunt force trauma around the area- as far as the forensic teams could tell, signs of Phantom ramming the knives through their heads before moving on. A few of them had boot shaped bruises in their ribs and other soft body parts- crushed hands and snapped ankles as well. They’d tried to run, but Phantom had stopped them before stabbing them through the eyes with a blade at least ten inches long- as evidenced by the tissue damage to their brains and the nicks in the back of the brain cavity, directly opposite the eye socket. Those had been thrown at close range, or launched somehow. Possibly bayonets given the slightly triangular shape of the wounds. A single person had been scattered slightly further away than the rest, with a trail of urine leading to a puddle where the investigators thought he initially had been prior to his death. Said person not only had a knife wound in the back of his skull, but the angle the wound was at indicated that it had been thrown from the center of the group of corpses _after_ the man had suddenly tripped up and fallen to the ground by something latching onto his leg and dragging him back a few feet before his untimely demise. Given the bruising and pattern of puncture marks, it was likely some kind of grappling hook as opposed to a bola or some type of shaker power. 

Armsmaster shook his head as he reviewed the documents, chewing on his lip thoughtfully as he sat down at his desk and pulled them up onto his computer as well, taking off his helmet and sighing once freed from the restrictive headwear. “Nine dead in less than thirty seconds, if Glory Girl’s testimony is to be believed. From the time it took for the first to die, to the time that Glory Girl dove back into the smoke to find Shadow Stalker should have been barely more than thirty seconds, and the assailant managed to not only kill nine people, but also completely and professionally treat Shadow Stalker’s bullet wound with proper field dressing within that time despite also having her in a submission hold with a _knife to her throat_.”

“Considering the theory we’re working with has Phantom as the result of an Empire attempt to create a biological super-assassin or super-soldier, I suppose we should only be glad that Phantom apparently has enough instincts to treat heroes and gang members with completely separate actions,” Dragon made sort of a shrugging motion with her avatar, watching Armsmaster pore over the tiny details revealed in the forensic reports, trying his damndest to recreate the scene based entirely off of two slightly traumatized girls’ testimonies and a slightly rushed autopsy.

“I’m glad that Phantom showed no actual hostility towards Shadow Stalker and Glory Girl, but I can’t be happy about the fact that they’ve started to throw the entire criminal political scene into chaos through _serial murder_ ,” Armsmaster growled, glaring at his screen and folding his hands under his chin. “Even when treating Shadow Stalker, Phantom held a knife to her throat the entire time, and has, in the span of time between when the two of them encountered Phantom and _now_ , there’s been at _least_ sixteen more killings in the last day, one of which happened in broad daylight outside the Dockworker’s Union building!”

“Outside the Dockworker’s Union building?” Dragon asked, raising her eyebrow as she pulled up a map of Brockton Bay. “That’s a little outside of the Empire’s territory, isn’t it?”

“It’s deep in ABB territory, yes. Which so far makes it the _single_ kill Phantom has made that’s off their usual pattern,” Armsmaster answered, tracing the map of kills that Phantom had made over the past week. “Every other kill so far has happened within Empire territory, indoors or within secluded alleyways cut off from most points of view, somewhere between eleven pm and five am. The single ABB member she’s killed happened in broad daylight at nine am _today_ , out in the open, the moment the man stepped onto the grounds of the Dockworker’s Union parking lot.”

“Do we know where the shot was taken?” Dragon asked, reviewing the CCTV footage of the incident and pursing her lips at the sight of ten lightly armed ABB members, none of them over the age of twenty five by her estimate, walking up to the DWU parking lot, only for their leader to fall dead as his head all but exploded and the rest to scatter into the streets with identical expressions of panic on their faces.

“Based on what we recovered from the scene, we think the shot was taken from atop the roof of the nearby Sharpton Hotel, a six story building with a direct sightline to the area. Half a mile away.” 

“Half a mile- that’s…” Dragon paused and tilted her head. “That’s far, but not outside the maximum effective range of a .300 Winchester Magnum cartridge, I think.”

“It’s an astonishingly accurate shot considering the wind conditions changed three times in that distance,” Armsmaster finished, his voice dropping into a deadpan as he tried to map some kind of pattern to Phantom’s actions. “More importantly, can you help me try and track Phantom? I’ve been tracing the locations for days and for some reason there doesn’t seem to be either a discernable pattern, or a direction they’re following.”

“Targets of opportunity, perhaps?” Dragon asked semi-rhetorically, taking the map data and running it through her own simulations. “There’s no accounting for random chance, after all, and Phantom might just be working on what they remember either of Empire members, or just killing them if they just so happen to find an Empire Member.”

“I know, but we have to keep trying. Otherwise more people are going to die, and at some point there’s every possibility that innocent people are going to get hurt.”


	5. 1.5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, that is an actual species name. Yes, I'm aware it's stupid.

**1.5 Afrarchaea Fernkloofensis**

The old one story house out near Capitol Hill wasn’t what Victor considered his first option in safehouses, if he were to be honest. It was sparsely furnished, the kitchen was tiny, and the bedroom was just barely big enough for him and Othala to live together without getting in each others’ way all the time. Though, Victor was at least used to this kind of living after so long in the Empire- or at least, his ever expanding repertoire of skills helped manage this kind of thing.

Othala, on the other hand… she was handling it a bit poorly. Oh sure, their actual home may have been a bit better than this, but what she was really handling poorly was their lack of actual privacy. Every single room in the entire building was bugged with cameras, sensors, and all sorts of security measures that were meant to make the house as secure as possible. Coupled with the dozens of outside guards hidden around the area- all of which he had a direct line to given his status as the last line of defense for Othala- there was a startling lack of privacy for anyone to enjoy, even in the bathrooms, windowless and cut off from the outside as they were.

The house wasn’t even connected to the power grid- everything was fueled by a highly efficient Tinker derived generator located in the house’s basement.

In short, a mildly inconvenient, privacy deficient, slightly disguised bunker.

Victor sighed quietly as he toured through the house, having led Othala into the safest point in the building already and let her go and unpack her things. The master bedroom may not have had real windows- the ones on the outside of the house were a mere facade, and the inside windows merely well disguised screens- but that was what one had to sacrifice to ensure the safety of the second most valuable Cape in the Empire. He couldn’t believe he trusted that absolute fool of a Tinker to make actual supersoldiers. Tinkers were supposed to be good at their jobs, and yet despite being a bioaugmentation specialty, the damned fool couldn’t even so much as make a useful serum without either killing his test subjects (all  _ two hundred _ of them) or killing  _ himself _ .

And now, there was a mad Tinker creation loose, murdering the Empire’s members, driving them into hiding, forcing them to try and disguise their names and faces, all their proud markings and their heritage. Their businesses had suffered much in the last week and a half, with almost a hundred and fifty of their members (thankfully, only ones lower down in the chain of command) dead and that number climbing every day.

It was infuriating, having to deal with the shortages of manpower brought on by that crazed assassin killing them all. There were  _ rules _ to this life that one did not simply break on a whim! And Victor, when he got his hands on the  _ wretch _ who dared killed the men under his commands, would  _ gladly  _ teach them to this  _ Phantom _ . Well, right before he killed the fool, at least.

But for now, all he could do was make sure Othala, sweet Othala, was safe. That she had the codes to the safe room, knew where the escape tunnel was, knew how and when to start running so that she’d have the greatest chance of escaping in the event that he died.

He wouldn’t, though. He was a trained, lethal assassin, and no Tinker creation that was probably already falling apart could match him- not when he’d leeched the skills out of hundreds of mercenaries, hitmen, assassins, soldiers, and black ops agents already, and had enough firepower squirreled away in the house to kill anything short of Hookwolf or Lung.

After combing the area once again, just to make sure everything was secured and all entrances were nigh unbreachable without anyone noticing, he turned his attention back to the outside. A quick check of his tablet showed the vitals of all the guards in the area- all stable, all alive for now. 

A flick of his fingertips across the screen and it showed their locations. All normal. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Victor pursed his lips as he passed by the basement door, chewing on his fingernail as he moved around through the narrow hallways and towards the master bedroom where Othala sat, pouting slightly as she watched him from the bed.

“You’ve been around this house three times already!” she whined, crossing her arms as the clock on the wall struck eleven, the faintest chime ringing from the bell within to mark the hour. “Come on, let’s go to sleep already!”

“In a moment, my dear,” Victor murmured, turning his attention away from the tablet just long enough to give Othala a quick kiss on the forehead. “You can’t be too careful after all.”

“I know,” she sighed, shaking her head as she slid under the covers and picked a book off of the night stand. “But at this point, you’re just tiring yourself out. Either this Phantom comes to kill us or they don’t. Either way, you should at least try to get some sleep in the event that it happens.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Victor murmured, watching Othala for a moment before turning away. “But I’m keeping my weapons near us tonight. Just in case.”

“Fine… just… turn out the lights already, okay?” Othala murmured, shutting her eyes and rolling over.

Victor chuckled, making one last round of the house before joining his wife in bed- though, to Othala’s regret, wearing his combat uniform instead of his usual pajamas.

}}8{{

Othala groaned and rolled over, blinking blearily and trying to focus through the haze of sleep. She whined quietly, clamping the pillow over her ears as the alarm on Victor’s tablet continued screeching the godawful tones it had been for the last minute or so.

“Othala! Othala you need to wake up!” Victor’s words brought Othala through the haze and into consciousness a moment later, as did the gentle touch of his hand on her shoulder. “Come on you need to get to the escape tunnel now!”

“Wh-wha?” Othala blinked slowly, taking in Victor’s panicked face as he swept around the bed and pulled on his tactical gear, reaching over and pushing Othala until she managed to slip out of bed and rub her eyes with a loud yawn. “What’s happening…?”

“It’s  _ here _ ,” Victor hissed, those two words sending a shock of ice down Othala’s spine in an instant, wakefulness crashing into her like a rising tide of frigid water and making her eyes widen in pure fear. “Go! You need to go now!”

“R-right!” Othala squeaked, immediately starting to hyperventilate as she grabbed the few essentials she needed and crawled under the bed to access the hidden tunnel. She slipped on her uniform as she crawled, thankful that she only wore her underwear to bed as she shimmied through a tight corridor and then out into a properly sized hallway, pulling up her bodysuit and attaching the belt, holstering her gun and applying her mask before pulling out her phone to keep a track of her husband. 

The cold snap of the hidden hatch closing behind her did little to quell the anxiety rising in her chest as she jogged down the corridor, following the twists and turns down into the tunnels beneath the city. 

She gulped quietly, slapping the side of her phone a few times as the feed from the security cameras in the house fizzled slightly from the distance and her position. So far, Victor was fine. Everything was fine. So what if half of the thirty guards were already dead? So what if the rest of the guards were getting hunted down?

Othala continued jogging down through the tunnels, the slaps of her footsteps echoing against smooth concrete walls and just barely masked by the sound of rushing water. She pulled up the map on her phone, noting the escape route she needed to take- there were already markings at every intersection, guiding her to the safety of the pickup point in case anything went wrong.

Something gnawed at her, though, a deep and cold fear that sank into her bones.

Twenty guards dead.

Twenty one.

Twenty two.

Twenty five.

Twenty nine.

Thirty guards dead, their corpses laying still as their vitals winked out.

Thirty good men, their lives snuffed out forever because some idiot Tinker managed to turn their single successful trial into a fucking  _ murder machine with a grudge _ .

Othala would have been angry if she wasn’t terrified.

As she climbed the ladder out of the tunnels, crawling out of a hidden hatch in an alleyway not too far from the safehouse, she heard the rapid  _ crack _ s of gunfire- the familiar sound of Victor’s custom guns against an unfamiliar assailant. She crept carefully out of the alley and into the prepared car, turning it on and shucking on the disguise packed into the glovebox to hide her allegiance.

Her hands shook as she continued to listen to the gunshots ringing out, breath hitching as she tried to glimpse something, anything in the mirrors. The house was there, but she couldn’t see anyone outside. She couldn’t hear gunshots anymore.

She looked around, bit her lip.

What if Phantom decided to come after her? What if the Phantom knew where she was?

She shook her head, easing the car out into the streets and drove away carefully with the lights off- at least until she turned into a major street and blended in with every other late night driver on the road.

She could almost believe that she was safe.

She breathed deeply, trying not to think of Victor, trying not to think of him dying, trying not to think of Phantom killing her husband-

She shrieked as an explosion rang out- a plume of fire thundering into the sky as the safehouse detonated and killed everyone inside.

Othala sobbed quietly as she drove along, trying to keep herself steady despite the ringing now in her ears, despite the pain in her heart.

As she drove further and further into the city, turning onto a side street leading towards another safehouse, she tried to breathe a sigh of relief- after all, if Victor had triggered the safehouse’s self-destruct, then whoever was inside stood no chance of surviving, right?

Right?

Othala continued driving, blinking tears out of her eyes.

As she pulled around another corner, she almost threw up.

Her heart sank.

A shadowy figure stood in the middle of the road.


	6. 1.6

**1.6 Afrarchaea Godfreyi**

“We’ve recovered a good amount of footage from the scene of the crime,” Armsmaster addressed the rest of the room, displaying what looked like traffic camera footage of Phantom blowing up a plain black car, causing it to flip over their head, and then pulling Othala from the wreckage right before slitting the Cape’s throat and walking away while the car exploded behind their back. “So far, what was recovered matches previous tactics shown by Phantom, though there is one other thing-”

“Hey wait a minute-” Assault chimed in for a moment, actually raising his hand and looking like he had something serious to say for once.

Armsmaster raised his eyebrow and nodded towards Assault, motioning to let him speak freely. “Go ahead, Ethan.”

“Thanks- I’m confused, actually. I thought Phantom didn’t show up in camera footage? Why the hell is he- or she- showing up  _ now _ ?” Ethan asked, taking off his helmet as if glaring at the footage now repeating from several angles would give him the answers.

“Unknown at the moment,” Armsmaster replied, sitting back down at the head of the table and pursing his lips. “I believe that Phantom  _ wants _ to be seen in this instance- likely because the Empire has, in the last few days, become quite aggressive in defense of their territory. Given that Phantom took the time to make sure Shadow Stalker’s bullet wound was properly treated, and that outside of the explosion that killed Victor has shown a remarkable amount of restraint in regards to property damage and endangering civilians, I’m willing to tentatively assume that Phantom  _ wants _ the Empire to focus on them instead of going after civilians.”

“Like that’s going to work,” Velocity sighed, frowning as he leaned forward. “All that Phantom’s doing now is making the Empire increasingly desperate. Killing their healer and tactical commander? Not gonna make them any less likely to lash out.”

“That is true, which is why we need to increase patrols and focus on ensuring that civilian casualties remain as low as possible,” Armsmaster nodded, shifting ever so slightly in his seat as he directed his gaze around the room. “Director Piggot has already approved this plan for now. You will all receive a full briefing document on your new orders after this meeting as well as an updated schedule. I will not lie, we will all need to put in as many extra hours as possible thanks to Phantom’s actions, but our standing orders at the moment are  _ do not engage _ . If Phantom is vulnerable enough or gives themself up willingly, we will take him or her in. However, if we act with hostility, there’s an excessively high chance that Phantom  _ will _ retaliate in the same way as with the Empire.”

“And nobody wants a bullet in their head,” Assault murmured under his breath, just loud enough for everyone else to hear. “Fine by me. I don’t like letting a murderous psychopath wander the streets on a whim, but I’d prefer to keep all my blood  _ inside _ my body where it belongs.”

“As…  _ unprofessional _ , as Assault’s statement is… I suppose I agree with it,” Dauntless spoke up just after, nodding slightly despite the frown on his face. “It still feels like we’re just letting some psychopath run around with no consequences, though. But… Whoever this Phantom is, they’re more than willing to kill, and their motivations are nebulous enough that I’d rather let them go tonight than not wake up tomorrow morning.”

“It is… not a good situation,” Armsmaster agreed as he took in his coworkers’ faces, all of whom looked less than happy about their new course of action. “I understand. And I agree with all of you, but we don’t have the manpower nor the necessary knowledge to try and provoke Phantom- If at any point we are assigned additional manpower from outside the city, we may be able to afford the risk, but as it stands… well. If that’s everything- dismissed.”

With that, everyone stood and filed out of the meeting room, murmuring amongst themselves as they seemed to almost huddle together- not showing fear, though it was obvious even to Armsmaster that the footage of Phantom so casually killing Othala had shaken their nerves.

Eventually, he stood and left as well, walking down the corridors of the Rig to his lab, where the same footage he’d shown to the rest of his coworkers was playing on loop, with several programs and algorithms already running, analyzing every frame of recovered footage they’d gathered so far.

The footage recovered from what was once an Empire safehouse and was now Victor’s smoldering grave had to have been placed deliberately- the footage had been found on a completely untouched external hard drive glued to a chunk of concrete atop the rubble, despite the fact that no one had been sighted approaching that area until the fire department had put out the blaze. The footage of Othala’s death was also deliberate- Phantom had stood in a spot where there were traffic cameras pointing directly at the vast majority of the street, giving them a clear view of what they had done to Othala, though that footage had been pulled directly from the cameras instead of a hard drive.

Armsmaster was… chilled, to say the least. No one else had noticed during the briefing- or if they had, no one had said anything, but he’d had to cut out a few bits of footage in between the time that Phantom had dragged Othala from the burning wreck of her car to when said car finally exploded and just barely avoided starting a conflagration thanks to all the melting snow still on and around people’s houses.

And then there was the footage gathered from around Victor’s safehouse.

As far as Armsmaster could tell from all the footage, the complete timeline went as such:

First: Phantom approached the house at exactly 1:55 am, sneaking towards the area on a vector that seemed to have come directly from where Othala’s getaway vehicle had been stashed. Upon reaching a two hundred meter radius from the safehouse, Phantom killed the first guard, shooting him through the chest and head with a sniper rifle- same cartridge as before, no bullet left behind. From there, the other guards went on high alert, phoning in backup to no avail- for some reason, none of their calls had gone through. Phantom waited exactly two minutes, then began systematically slaughtering the rest of the guards at high speed, usually with high powered cartridges fired through car windows, or neurotoxin laced syringes fired into the necks of the guards hidden out in more open areas. There had been eighteen guards in the outdoor rotation- six found dead in their cars with bullet holes punched through glass and unarmored car doors, seven found dead at the base of trees surrounded by broken branches, and five found on the surrounding rooftops, their throats impaled by some manner of throwing knife. Of the remaining twelve guards, there were two found in each house around the safehouse, all dead from either strangulation or asphyxiation, with evidence of some manner of highly toxic aerosol having been deployed in three of the six houses- though again, the manner of deployment and the actual gas had long since vanished by morning. 

The various traffic cameras set up in the neighborhood had shown Phantom sprinting around at inhuman speeds, flitting between shadows as they attacked the rooftop guards and flung what was likely some kind of smoke grenade into the windows of the houses where the dead guards had been found.

None of them had taken more than a single shot, and of those that did manage to spot Phantom, none of them had actually  _ hit _ the assassin.

Second: After killing all of the guards, Phantom subsequently smashed open the door of the house and began a running battle with Victor. There, the assassin stumbled exactly twice- likely due to Victor starting to siphon off their skills before they could kill him. Though before Victor could do anything, Phantom had shot Victor in the shoulder the first time, then in the leg the second- each time with decreasing efficiency compared to the supernaturally good aim Phantom had displayed before. Unfortunately for Victor, the man hadn’t been able to start draining Phantom’s skills a third time before the assassin had closed into melee distance.

Or rather- Victor had, after getting shot the first two times, attempted to kill Phantom with a burst from his custom built submachine gun, only for the assassin to throw down an instantly bursting smoke pellet that flooded the entryway to the house with smoke in less than a second. Phantom had subsequently vanished from camera view without leaving a distortion in the smoke at all, and when the smoke faded, the assassin had grabbed Victor by the back of his neck and thrown him bodily from the house until he rolled to a stop in the street.

From there, a short running battle began as Victor attempted to run to safety, only for Phantom to completely abandon precision shooting in favor of sheer volume. At some point, Phantom had either picked up, manifested, or summoned a modified M134 Minigun and had begun firing at Victor, saturating the street with bullets until the man was just shy of dead. Said Minigun was immediately dropped and vanished in between frames of the recording. 

Third: Phantom proceeded to pick up Victor’s almost corpse and stake him- still alive, if only barely- to the hood of one of the guards’ cars, parked directly in front of the household. Immediately after, Phantom returned to the interior of the house, saved the camera footage onto the same external hard drive that the PRT retrieved, and proceeded to leave once again. Once outside, Phantom executed Victor… and vanished.

From the timestamps between the traffic cameras at the safehouse and on the street where Othala died, there was only an approximately six minute difference in time from when Phantom vanished from one set of cameras and appeared in the other.

Despite the two locations being separated from each other by ten miles in a straight line.

At that point, Phantom simply  _ appeared _ on camera the same way they had vanished, and simply stood there until Othala’s vehicle had rounded the corner, at which point Phantom fired a strange disk from what looked like an underslung attachment to a standard grenade launcher. Said disk had flown beneath Othala’s car and subsequently exploded with enough force to launch the car over Phantom’s head with at least a foot of clearance.

From there, Phantom quickly pulled Othala from the wreckage, kicked the woman a few times until her limbs were obviously broken, then proceeded to slit her throat, toss a grenade into the burning car, and walk away.

Armsmaster sighed as he finished reviewing the footage and compiling the data together, pursing his lips and feeling tired beyond his years as he leaned back in his chair. From just the fact that the footage existed at all, he could instantly tell that it was supposed to be a public statement- the sheer volume of the executions ensured it as such. Victor’s safehouse exploding from the triggered failsafe, Othala’s car being blown up in the middle of a residential area. Phantom was clearly trying to get the E88 to target them.

The only question now was how much the situation would escalate until either one party was dead, or the entire city descended into open gang warfare and burned to the ground.


	7. 1.7

**1.7 Afrarchaea Haddadi**

Clockblocker had…  _ mixed _ feelings about the current state of the city. On the one hand, the Empire had lost literally over a quarter of its members within a month, as well as two of its most prominent capes. On the other hand, the heroes had nothing to do with said removals, considering that they were all perpetrated by a crazed lunatic with a penchant for knives, guns, and leaving corpses strung up in alleyways and staked to cars.

Yes, that was a recent development.

No, he didn’t care for the endless reports of Phantom staking Nazis to the hoods of their cars. 

God knew Sophia was in a better mood than she’d ever been before with all the Nazis dying horrible, painful deaths, but honestly? Clockblocker just felt sick.

There was a line that people  _ didn’t cross _ for a reason, and now the Empire had been putting up signs and tags that were literally urging people to go and try and hunt down the assassin and engage with lethal force.

And there were…  _ so _ many things wrong with that idea. The first being that, Clockblocker sighed to himself as he read through the reports again, what fucking good would a bunch of unpowered neonazi thugs do against a superpowered assassin with literally at least a two or higher in almost all the PRT power classifications possible? The second being, well, even if Phantom was a crazed lunatic with a grudge against Nazis (and who could blame them, honestly?), he still didn’t want to see what the Empire would do if they actually managed to catch Phantom.

Privately, Clockblocker figured that Phantom would end up killing everyone until they got to the capes, at which point it was anyone’s game as to whether or not the Brute/Trump/Striker/etc etc would be able to take out the actual heavy hitters.

He had five bucks on Phantom being able to at least handle Cricket and Rune because their costumes were crap and their defenses weren’t that great. Sophia had another twenty on Phantom killing them all.

Yes, sure, betting on whether or not Phantom would murder a bunch of people or be murdered in turn was morbid and more than a little unprofessional, but since all Wards activities were currently benched beyond onsite training and console duty for the adult patrols, it was really hard to not come up with  _ something  _ to try and entertain themselves.

He sighed and leaned back in his chair as he finished reading the report again and tossed the packet back onto the desk. Sure, he was on console duty tonight but it was… slow. The ABB was biding their time, the Nazis were probably rearing back to kick Phantom’s ass and were too busy to do any actual street level crime, and the Merchants… eh. Fuck ‘em. They usually didn’t make enough trouble that the Protectorate could really respond to anyway.

“Bored bored bored, bored bored boooooored,” he grumbled, kicking his feet up and rolling his eyes as he tapped the headset and actually started paying attention to what was happening. Which was…

Nothing.

Great.

Just the same old cross chatter that he didn’t have to listen to. Assault and Battery doing their weird flirty thing, Armsmaster on his bike, Miss Militia calling in about investigating what sounded like a running Cape battle- Wait what?

_ “Console this is Miss Militia, I’m hearing shots fired on Elm, moving to investigate now. Sounds like three shooters and several vehicles-” _

“Miss Militia, this is Console, I’m patching you through to Armsmaster now. Do you need backup?” Clockblocker asked, putting on his serious voice and sitting up straight. He’d have cracked a joke but considering what he was seeing from Miss Militia’s bodycam, this was no ordinary gang shooting in progress. 

_“Affirmative! I have visual on Phantom!_ _They’re moving down Elm, heading towards Fifth street! Three cars, heavily armed, Phantom on the rooftops- looks like the Empire brought Cape support too. I have eyes on Stormtiger, no sign of any others.”_

“Armsmaster this is Clockblocker on Console, Miss Militia’s confirmed visual on target Phantom along with three cars of Empire and Stormtiger, heading down Elm towards Fifth, how soon can you intercept?”

_ “Three minutes, tell her to hold back and do not engage!” _

“Copy that, Miss Militia, do you read? Armsmaster says do not engage, wait three minutes for backup. Assault and Battery, do you have time to intercept?”

_ “Negative, we’re too far to make it there fast enough. If you can drive them towards Lord’s Street, we can be there in two minutes!” _

“Roger that- Armsmaster, you read?”

_ “Copy that. Assault and Battery hold position, Miss Militia, I’ll be there soon. Try and guide them towards Assault and Battery.” _

_ “Copy.” _

Clockblocker fell silent as he watched the camera feeds, Miss Militia rushing in from behind the cars as the Empire thugs chased after Phantom, who had jumped into the road and was somehow managing to run faster than the cars chasing them down at well over sixty miles an hour.

Man, Velocity was going to be  _ pissed _ .

He watched a little longer, then winced as Phantom fired what seemed to be their first shot of the entire battle- a single shot from an unidentifiable, large black pistol, one that immediately cracked through the windshield of the lead car and-

_ “One driver down, car has crashed, moving to rescue casualties.” _

Miss Militia slowed to a halt next to the now overturned car, her body camera taking in the grisly sight of the driver, completely and utterly dead with a hole the size of a grapefruit punched through his chest and a face smashed in against the steering wheel. The other occupants of the car were dazed and wounded, and the heroine wasted no time pulling them out and cuffing them together with zip ties- just in time for Armsmaster to roar past her position and activate the sirens on his bike.

Phantom didn’t stop running, especially after Stormtiger started launching air blasts at the assassin- not that any of them came close, with Phantom weaving between them as if they were just an inconvenience rather than a series of attacks that could have shredded a car apart.

Even still, the black clad cape continued to fire back at the two cars, taking potshots at Stormtiger though the man managed to deflect all of them before they could do any real damage. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for Armsmaster’s halberd, which discharged an EMP into the cars and brought them to a halt. 

And then things got… messy.

Phantom had stopped running  _ away,  _ though they’d immediately rushed  _ back _ towards the cars and started firing again, this time killing the Empire goons before they could even finish piling out. Stormtiger, meanwhile, had started attacking Armsmaster at midrange, resulting in both hero and villain being distracted long enough for Phantom to switch targets and head for  _ Miss Militia _ instead, tackling the hero away from the tied up goons she’d been standing near just in time for a shot to ring out and a bullet to whiz past the both of them.

Phantom’s body language changed at that point, though Clockblocker didn’t quite have a good view of it- Armsmaster was busy fighting Stormtiger and Miss Militia’s bodycam wasn’t positioned quite right, but the goons in the distance suddenly  _ paled _ as the one of them who’d managed to sneak his gun out of his pants immediately tried to break free and run… only for Phantom to throw down a smoke grenade and  _ vanish. _

Seconds later, the smoke dissipated and Phantom stood over four new corpses, pulling a karambit out of the skull of the idiot who’d fired at Miss Militia with a sickening squelch. The assassin didn’t even so much as seem  _ bothered _ by it, casually wiping the knife off on the dead man’s clothes before letting it fade away like smoke.

Everyone paused and stared for a few seconds.

The street went silent.

Clockblocker watched, going slightly green in the face from just how casually Phantom had murdered a whole bunch of people in cold blood, unable to look away from the screen as Phantom stood up slowly and-

Vanished. 

A curl of smoke had formed at their feet, swirling around and around until it engulfed the cape and cleared out, leaving Phantom completely gone- or so Clockblocker thought, until Stormtiger jerked forward with an aborted scream, flecks of blood spraying from his chest as Phantom appeared once again and stabbed the man in the back over and over before reaching up, grabbing his head and-

“Oh god I think I’m gonna be sick,” Clockblocker groaned, shuddering and forcing himself to hold down his bile as he threw off his headset and ran for the bathroom, just barely making it in time to spew his dinner down the drain, unable to stop shuddering from the sight of Phantom  _ ripping Stormtiger’s head off _ and tossing it to the side like so much garbage.

He stayed there for a few more minutes, groaning and retching until nothing else came up, his face pale and haunted as he tried to scrub the image from his mind, tried to forget the  _ scream _ Stormtiger had made as he died.

How much more of this was Phantom going to do, he thought to himself, blinking tears from his eyes and snorting to get the smell of vomit out of his nose. And how long would the Protectorate and the PRT just… not be able to do anything about it?

Clockblocker didn’t know, but he had a sinking feeling that Phantom wouldn’t stop until either the Empire was destroyed, or they were.


	8. 1.8

**1.8 Afrarchaea Harveyi**

Lena wasn’t really sure what to think about the newest addition to the shelter. Oh sure, the girl never made a fuss, never made any trouble, never had any issues if the shelter didn’t have enough food that day, never even so much as complained if Lena had to turn her away when they were at capacity…

But that was the problem.

There was…

_ Nothing _ in her eyes. It was as if the girl didn’t even  _ exist _ . She never said a word, never opened her mouth for anything more than food or water, never even so much as even  _ groaned _ or expressed disappointment.

For well over a month now, she’d been showing up, always taking a single meal pack the moment the shelter opened in the morning and then vanishing into the crowd. If she couldn’t come in early enough to secure a sleeping place that night, she’d just walk away and turn the corner and-

Well, Lena wasn’t exactly sure what the girl was doing in the city, but she always showed up the next day completely unharmed, always at the exact same time, and without a single sign of stress or trouble on her face.

Just that same, blank, dead expression. And when Lena had offered her a job at the shelter, so she could keep an eye on the girl, make sure she wasn’t sleeping out in the cold, make sure she at least had  _ something _ to keep her off the streets and with a warm meal in her belly… the girl had just shaken her head and walked away.

But the next morning, Lena had found her inside the shelter, sweeping the hallways and emptying trash cans as if she’d been there all night.

She hadn’t been given a key.

The doors had still been locked.

Lena had thought it strange, but if the girl had a few strange talents that maybe involved breaking and entering, Lena wasn’t going to begrudge her- besides, nothing had been stolen from the inventory save for the cleaning supplies that the girl had clearly and visibly placed on the janitor’s cart she’d been dragging around, so she figured it was, if not fine, then not really the worst thing in the world.

After all, there was a superpowered serial killer on the loose, and if Lena could keep one more person off the street in the face of the Empire’s building rampage, then she was more than happy to let the girl indulge in her oddities.

After that first night, though, Lena had taken the girl aside and asked her to not break in next time, and to at least try to clock in properly- not that they had an actual punch card system or whatever, but the little clipboard at the reception desk for volunteers to write their names on was more than enough.

And the girl had… nodded. Completely silent. But Lena thought there was a glimmer of life in her eyes after that. Some kind of… well, Lena didn’t know the girl well enough to know for sure, but she thought it might be hope. Gratitude, even. A sense of purpose.

Whatever it was, the girl began showing up more frequently- in the middle of the day even, just to volunteer with whatever she could help with. Cleaning the halls, making sure the beds were clean, washing sheets and blankets in the laundry room downstairs, making sure the people in the shelter were warm enough, had enough water, had at least enough food to last a day or so if they couldn’t make it back that night. She never once spoke during that entire time, but she had a notepad with all the relevant questions on them and she pointed them out whenever she needed. 

Lena wasn’t sure how she managed with some of the ones who had poor eyesight or couldn’t read too well, but she did anyway.

The girl was skilled like that.

The girl was skilled in a whole lot of things, apparently. Repairing things, sewing, cleaning, cooking- she was surprisingly strong too, despite her thin, almost emaciated frame. Lena wasn’t really sure, but she thought that, under those baggy clothes, the girl might have had more muscle definition than her slouch and shuffling walk would imply.

There were other oddities too, as Lena saw the girl more and more. She never took off her jacket, even when the inside of the shelter was a balmy 70 degrees or more, never took off the sturdy pair of black gloves. She never seemed to wear anything other than that same pair of slightly ratty, slightly oversized pair of gray sweatpants and some worn out tennis shoes that looked like they were a bad day away from just completely falling apart. She never seemed cold even if she was covered in snow, never seemed hot even if she were standing in the middle of the kitchen, never made a sound unless she was approaching other people, seemed to vanish the moment anyone took their eyes off of her, never smiled, never laughed, never even so much as changed her expression no matter what anyone said to her.

Privately, Lena felt a little guilty about comparing her to a robot when she noticed how tirelessly the girl worked, never slowing down even after working for several hours, not even flinching at even the hardest of duties. She was always on time, always did spectacular work, always finished her work with extreme efficiency.

Always scanned the room like she was expecting someone to stab her, always stared whenever something made a loud sound that she wasn’t expecting, always seemed a little too comfortable holding knives in her hands.

Something in Lena whispered that the girl was dangerous, sometimes. Whenever her already flat stare would turn into something dark, whenever the girl glared at whoever made a loud noise, clenched her fists when she saw anyone with a bald head, twitched almost imperceptibly whenever the Empire thugs came around to try and intimidate them- though, that last one was happening less and less these days…

Probably because the Empire was pulling its forces back to hunt down the serial killer assassinating their members in broad daylight. 

Phantom, the news called her. 

It was a fitting name, though a little bit passive for such a…  _ violent _ person.

Lena still felt sick remembering how Phantom had literally ripped off Stormtiger’s head in the middle of an intersection a few days prior, how she’d been standing there, mouth gaping wide open in sheer, horrified shock.

She shook her head and returned to her duties, trying not to let her emotions show too harshly on her face as she handed out meal packs and helped a few of the women into the shelter so they could rest.

The winter was wearing on everyone, especially now that there was apparently the stirrings of a gang war building in the northern parts of town.

Lena didn’t need to make anyone feel worse by getting sick at work. So she calmed down, finished her duties, and kept a watch on the new girl, who was… somewhere.

Somewhere…

Lena looked around slowly, then immediately flinched back with a quiet yelp as the girl somehow  _ appeared right behind her _ despite the fact that she’d been walking in an  _ empty hallway _ .

“Oh- I um! I was just looking for you!” Lena immediately stammered out, clutching a hand over her chest as she looked at the girl across from her- in fact, looking slightly up since she was what, 5’10” compared to Lena’s 5 foot nothing. “Look… it’s getting pretty dangerous out there and I don’t… I don’t want to  _ assume _ whatever your situation is, but… I’d feel pretty bad if I let a kid like you out onto the streets when there’s a gang war brewing so… um. You’re welcome to stay here- in my office. You know where it is, right?”

The girl nodded slowly, blinking almost owlishly in the single biggest display of emotion Lena had ever seen out of the girl.

“Great. I set up a futon there- it’s not much, but… it’s safer than an alleyway or a park bench,” Lena sighed, gently patting the girl on the shoulder and walking past her. “I’m… going home for the night. I’ll see you tomorrow?”

The girl said nothing, but simply tapped her on the hip as she walked past.

As Lena checked out of the shelter for the night, she idly read through the list of volunteer names on the other clipboard, noting all the regulars who’d since been cutting back on their duties lately for obvious reasons, before coming to a stop at the last name on the list- the girl, whose name she hadn’t even really known for the longest time.

Anne Rose, written in perfect, looping cursive with a distinctive curling flair on the R and the E in Rose.

What a pretty name.


	9. 1.9

**1.9 Afrarchaea Kranskopensis**

There was…. an uncomfortable tension in the air.

It was the tension of… something, Jerry felt. Not fear, never fear. Kaiser would never be afraid of some upstart punk Cape even if they  _ were _ murdering their way through the Empire at frankly ridiculous speed.

But Kaiser had a plan to deal with them, and he’d said as much during a rally of theirs- or rather, Hookwolf had told them that Kaiser had a plan and that business was to continue as usual for everyone not involved in the direct outreach part of the gang.

Jerry was honestly starting to have second thoughts about that, considering the fact that he worked in a dogfighting ring and honestly there was every chance of either getting beat the fuck up by some drunk asshole, torn to pieces by some fugly monster riding chick in a cheap dollar store mask, or, in the case of Ring 6- the nice one under the laundromat- literally all getting assassinated by a cloud of some kind of godawful nerve gas pumped in through the vents by that creepy murderhobo Phantom.

Which was why he’d stayed home from “work” the last couple of days- packing his bags, getting his affairs in order, making an appointment with a guy he knew down in Boston to go get his tats covered up, making another appointment with a different guy he knew to get some new papers drawn up so he’d be all set for a new job workin’ a bar in some midwest fuckoff town down in Kansas or some shit with a lady he knew back before the Empire took over all the tiny gangs in the downtown area that cropped up after Marquis got fucked up.

See, he was lucky like that because he was just high up enough on the totem pole that he got to take days off from being a gang member that weren’t just the normal dry spells in between events.

Now, all Jerry had to do was wait a few more days until the time came, then bail out on this shithole of a city, stop pretending to be a racist shithead to keep himself safe, and then go out and die an old man in the middle of fuckoff nowhere or something far far away from the pack of morons that had somehow managed to make an unstoppable murder Cape with a grudge against anyone dumb enough to be a neonazi in Brockton Bay.

But somehow… he couldn’t help but feel like he was being  _ watched _ …

}8{

“Check in once every hour. You don’t check in on schedule, you got about five minutes either way to prove you’re alive before we call you dead. Sleep in shifts, four guys on watch at all times- two keeping an eye out on the outside, two making sure none of the guys inside get fucked up. You all know your schedules, don’t fuck this up.”

Jerry watched quietly as his boss (an actual neonazi) walked out the door, clomping around in his milsurp combat boots like an asshole as he left to go visit the other rings he was supervising for Hookwolf.

So much for running the dogfighting ring, he muttered to himself, inaudible to everyone but his own ears. Oh sure, he didn’t like the job any more than anyone else with half a braincell and even a quarter of a conscience did, but he could recognize what his boss and by extension the rest of the Empire was doing- closing ranks, making sure that they could keep as much manpower as possible.

It wasn’t gonna work, even he could tell. Phantom had been chewing through members faster than a fucking lawnmower through grass and it was only a matter of time before the fucker killed the rest of them too.

Jerry wasn’t scared. Or at least, that’s what he told himself to keep the nerves from getting to him as he settled into the midsized office building that was supposed to be their safehouse for the foreseeable future. At least it was well stocked- all the food and guns a gangbanger like him could ask for. They’d even got actual air mattresses instead of the shitty one inch thick camping mattresses those poor fucks down at the corner of Sixth and Bascom got.

Ha, served ‘em right for not making their quota. Dumb fucks.

As Jerry settled into his bunk for the night, he checked his phone, tapping the icon to check in as he did so before drawing the covers over his head and swiftly falling asleep.

He did not sleep restfully.

Dreams plagued him the whole night- memories and anxieties playing in his head. A shadowy nightmare crawling through the hallways with vengeance and blood on its lips. Regrets piled up in his mind- he should have never taken the job to deliver shit to that dumbfuck Conrad, and his dreams, what little flashes were coherent enough to make sense, made him imagine in horrible detail the sheer amount of carnage he’d been accidentally responsible for.

The victims he’d delivered for those racist nazi fucks, the people who’d died because of the fact that he had made the choice to go off and help kidnap a bunch of hobos off the street, picked up a bunch of unlucky gutter trash for an idiot Tinker who couldn’t even control his one successful creation.

And look where that got them now.

Jerry awoke in a cold sweat, heart pounding in his chest as he climbed out of his bunk and checked in again. He’d been asleep barely a few hours, but his heart was racing like he’d just run a marathon. He wrinkled his nose as he slid off the shitty air mattress and pulled on a spare shirt- something smelled absolutely rank. Did someone piss themselves in the middle of the night or something?

He shook his head and tried to adjust for the low light in the barracks which had been converted from a windowless meeting room- nothing really stood out to him, but considering it was pitch-ass dark and it was two in the morning, it wasn’t really like he could do anything about it. 

As Jerry quietly tiptoed out of the room, he nodded at the two silent guards watching the halls and the room.

“Just getting some water,” he muttered, saluting vaguely. Neither man really reacted beyond what he thought was a cursory small nod. That same nasty scent seemed to permeate the halls of the building even as he walked towards the bathroom- seriously, did someone spill a bunch of cleaning solution or something?

He continued on through the building slowly, hairs raising on the back of his neck as he registered the absolute  _ silence _ in the building.

Which… wasn’t right. There should have been people walking the halls. There should have been  _ some _ noise- either from the appliances running in the rooms all over the place, or the vents, or- something. Anything.

But there was nothing.

Nothing but a slow dripping noise coming from the bathroom.

A puddle of  _ something _ leaking out from the door.

A puddle that, in the light barely creeping in from the outside windows, looked suspiciously red.

“Shit… I  _ really _ hope that’s not what I think it is,” Jerry mumbled, the cold sweat returning with a vengeance as he slowly drew his only protection- a six inch combat knife- from its sheath and crept for the door, kicking it open and recoiling at the sight of one of the guards assigned- James or some shit-  _ flayed open and hanging from the ceiling _ .

“Oh Jesus fuck!” Jerry immediately scrambled back, screaming at the top of his lungs as he sprinted towards the barracks. “Everyone wake the fuck up! Phantom’s here! We’re fucked!”

He continued screaming, waving his arms to try and get the attention of the guards outside- why weren’t they reacting? Why were they just standing there?

Why were they-

Jerry screeched as he all but slammed into the guard on the left, the man barely budging from where his body had been strung up like a  _ fucking turkey _ hanging from a wire, his head falling to the floor and bumping into the feet of the second guard, who was all but lashed to a potted plant, throat slit wide open.

Jerry vomited as he sank to his knees, suddenly keenly aware of the smell of blood and shit and piss staining the carpet. His eyes watered as he tried to grab ahold of his wits, slamming the door to the barracks wide open and turning on the lights-

Only to see nothing but a sea of corpses.

Every single man in the room had been murdered in their sleep, blood staining the white carpet and the smell of fecal matter clogging the room.

Jerry choked, stumbling backwards until he bumped into something tall and solid.

He turned and-

“No! Fuck! No no no no no! I’m not with them! I swear! I was going to leave!” he begged and pleaded, throwing himself against the wall as the silent, shadowy  _ Phantom _ stalked forward, boots thumping heavily against the floor as the murderer advanced.

“Please! Don’t kill me!” Jerry whimpered, losing the ability to stand from sheer terror, not even caring that he’d wet his pants and was now curled up in the corner in a fetal ball.

He braced himself for the pain of death, only to hear…

A soft hissing noise.

He looked up and saw Phantom walking out of the room, closing the door with a final  _ click. _

He saw the canister in the middle of the room. A solid black cylinder spewing white clouds from the top.

Jerry choked on his own breath as it filled the room.

He went numb.

The last thing that Jerry felt before his lungs and heart finally seized up and gave out was the sensation of falling… and then…

Nothing.


	10. 1.10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bleh, this one really fought me.

**1.10 Afrarchaea Lawrencei**

Jun was… conflicted.

Oh sure, it was nice enough that the city was getting cleaned up of all the Nazi scum wandering the streets- that much literally everyone agreed on, from the foulest Merchants to even the most innocent of civilians. Sam and Jimmy had been partying it up when the news reported the deaths of a couple of those E88 cape bastards, and even Boss Liu had been happier than usual.

Probably because they were expanding their little section of territory into what used to be E88 holdings with very little resistance.

Oh sure, there was the occasional tagging war where it seemed like they’d had to re-do their gang tags every goddamn night since those goddamn Nazi shitheads kept spraying over them with their fucking swastikas, but otherwise, the whities were more concerned with the murder hobo killing them all.

Served ‘em right too, Jun thought to himself. Just one problem fucking up the good vibes, though-

That fucking goddamn murder hobo apparently had no problems killing ABB members too if they went _anywhere_ in public.

Sure, it wasn’t like they were getting slaughtered like the E88, but the rank and file (which included Jun, because he wasn’t a stupid fucking idiot) was quickly learning where they could and couldn’t go anymore without getting capped in the fucking head.

Fortunately for Lung’s patience, that area was just the area around the old DWU building and like, half the unclaimed area around the docks and Boardwalk.

Not a whole lot of ABB stuff happened there, so thank every fucking god from Dao to Shinto for small mercies.

Still, Jun couldn’t help but feel a little wary of the ABB’s push into what used to be E88 territory- he wouldn’t be the first to think that maybe the Phantom would turn on them in full after the bastard was done with the Nazis and he probably wouldn’t be the last; not only just killing them when they went to certain places, but killing every single man, woman, and child all the way to the last just for existing.

Jun would never admit it, but he was kind of terrified.

Even the more hardcore members, the guys who worked closer to the center of ABB territory, the guys who enjoyed killing and raping and thieving and all that other shit that brought the ABB the big bucks- those guys were starting to feel the slow, creeping anxiety too.

Or at least, that’s what Kevin said when he’d made a supply run to deliver a case full of collected protection money over to their boss. Jun was, understandably, skeptical. Mostly because Kevin was full of shit on the best of days and getting sixth or seventh hand news passed from their boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss was probably less than reliable.

He’d also heard word on the local grapevine that apparently there were a shitload of new E88 capes popping out of the fucking woodwork, which was literally the single reason why the fucking Nazis had managed to keep even a halfway relevant foothold in the city despite the fact that nearly all of their unpowered members had been slaughtered to the last by now- well, that, and probably Gesellschaft interference according to PHO.

Which, well.

Fucking yikes.

Well, he’d also heard that a lot of those new E88 capes were winding up dead in the fucking streets so that was nice. Fuck them anyway, especially the ones that were definitely Gesellschaft fuckers.

“Oi, Jun! We’re running low on product!” his boss, an old lady named Go-eun, shouted, waving her cane at him to draw his attention. “Get your ass up and fetch us more from resupply!”

Jun groaned as he stood up, roused from his brooding introspection (or, really, just him staring off into space after taking maybe one or two more hits from the bong than he should have) by the tough-as-nails grandma. As he stood, he slipped on his jacket and sighed. Maybe he should try his luck moving somewhere else for a while?

No, then Boss Go-eun would get pissed that he ran off, and she’d use her mysterious granny magics to get Oni Lee to drag his ass back kicking and screaming (or as a corpse) or something.

Jun paused as he fiddled with his car keys, blinking twice at his own stream of consciousness. Really, what was he thinking? It wouldn’t be Oni Lee- his entire group was way too far down the pole for Lung to send his attack dog down at them- no, it’d just be a couple of the leg breakers. Probably Shun. Bastard still had a grudge against him after he’d cleaned him out that one time on poker night.

Oh well, as long as he got out of dodge before Phantom started murdering literally everyone in the ABB, he’d be fine. Probably. Maybe he’d go chill with his cousins in Oregon for a while.

Idly, Jun wondered if little Kimiko still liked horses. Maybe he’d bring a gift or two with him.

}8{

Jun was… really feeling the stress these days. It was near the end of February at this point, and his boss’ bosses had their little group working like goddamn dogs. Constant moving around, constant shuffling from one safehouse to another. Constantly piling and packing shipments of drugs and guns and all sorts of contraband into and out of his shitty pickup truck, constantly having to go around in new neighborhoods to go lay down the law with a bunch of entitled white shitheads who might not have been part of the E88 proper, but were definitely racist enough to enjoy giving the Nazis protection money while they were still around.

Shun had been smashing up a lot of shops recently, come to think of it. Even Boss Go-eun was feeling the strain… which, well. 

Jun would have said fucking _obviously_ , the lady was well over sixty years old… if he hadn’t personally seen Go-eun kick Sam’s shit in when he decided to goof off on duty instead of going out to collect protection money on time. 

Boss Go-eun was fucking _scary,_ man.

Kinda had to be, what with her being an old lady in a profession usually made up of men in between ages twenty to forty.

As it were, he’d been having a lot of sleepless nights, mostly because they were pushing into the thicker parts of E88 territory lately and he knew damn well that those Nazi bastards (what few of them were still fucking _alive_ after Phantom left a goddamn trail of corpses in the upper hundreds count) weren’t above torching a place to the ground just to spite the honest ABB members inside.

Fuck them Nazis, man. 

He’d already lost a few buddies to them torching their own goddamn territory like they were trying to go for some kind of World War Two kinda scorched earth policy instead of it being literally just a bunch of Nazis getting purged like they deserved.

It was their own goddamn businesses and office buildings getting burned up, goddamn. Not even Lung himself would willingly torch a perfectly good business if someone tried to take it from him.

Jun paused and reconsidered, tacking on a caveat to the end of that thought. 

He wouldn’t do it unless they insulted him directly or some shit.

Actually Lung would probably torch it on principle…

Hm.

Bad example.

Well, regardless, it was Nazis doing it and not the gang boss that Jun worked under so by some fuzzy kinda logic that made what they were doing bad and what Lung might do sometimes… less bad by comparison?

Sure.

Jun shrugged as he capped off that line of thought and finished unpacking the week’s shipment of whatever contraband it was this week, turning away from the boxes and yawning as he stepped back into his truck. Whatever. It wasn’t like he’d have to worry about the E88 soon anyway, with the rate Phantom was killing them all off.


	11. 1.11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorta back from my hiatus- Alex and I have finished a few stories in the ToZ series, so I actually have some time to write for Archaeidae again!

**1.11 Afrarchaea Neethlingi**

When one usually thought of the local morning news, most would agree that they usually expected things like the weather forecast for the day, maybe some important political decision or maybe a local celebrity doing something strange.

In Brockton Bay, maybe there’d be news about a capefight happening the night before, or reports on the aftermath of one such fight.

Dinah Alcott awoke to her parents nervously pacing about in the kitchen of their home, muttering at one another about the news shown on the front page of that day’s paper. 

“I’m telling you, it’s just not safe here anymore! There’s people dying in the streets! Getting staked to cars and hung from streetlights!” her mother almost shouted, waving her hands frantically about in the vague direction of where the newspaper was laying on the table, draped soggily all over her father’s breakfast from where it’d slipped from his hands in shock. 

Dinah would have wondered what the two of them were talking about, if not for the fact that for the last nearly two months the only thing the news could talk about was _Phantom this_ and _Phantom that_ , the shadowy specter of death that plagued the Empire and slaughtered their members without an ounce of mercy or remorse, leaving behind a bloody wake of corpses that left the streets running red.

Dinah didn’t exactly feel bad about it, considering that one of the kids she went to school with stopped showing up after the Empire made a big push into his neighborhood a few months ago. Either he’d moved away or-

Well.

Dinah knew damn well what usually happened to people who spoke out against the Empire in their own territory. She’d heard the rumors, after all, and even the wildest rumor was built with a grain of truth. Even if one thread on PHO was wrong, there were hundreds like that.

That said, while her parents were distracted by muttering adult things at each other and pacing around the kitchen, Dinah took the time to sneakily steal the soggy newspaper off of her father’s breakfast and read the slightly smeared text with a discerning eye.

The headline told her all she really needed to know, though the censored, blurred out photos of three masked people hanging from a lamp post in the middle of a plaza that Dinah vaguely remembered as being in what PHO had marked down as Empire territory certainly added to the effect.

‘Three Empire Capes found Dead in Crescent Boulevard Plaza’, it read rather simply, then expounded upon their names in the article. Unfortunately (well, it _was_ fortunate that they were dead, but still) none of the three were the Empire’s more famous parahumans, but each one was definitely an Empire member- two of which were positively identified as some random people that Dinah had never heard of before, the third of which was a man she’d once seen working with Uncle Roy at the city hall- Hal, his name had been. Or, according to the paper, “Laguz”, an apparently recent recruit who’d been a hydrokinetic capable of manipulating the water inside living beings. The other two, SS and Mjolnir, had been apparently a cloning type Master who could spawn a bunch of ghostly soldiers like Crusader (though, with guns and more solid) and a Brute/Striker who had super strength and could give anything he held a powerful electric charge, respectively.

Not that Dinah much cared about their powers or identities, considering they were now _dead_ , and she could thankfully say that the city now had three fewer super powered Nazis living in it.

There was also the third page article about another five or so members of the E88 winding up dead, but considering that the official death count was well over three hundred, Dinah could say with reasonable certainty that if the Empire _actually_ had any normal members left, they were almost all either out of state, quitting, or too stupid to live.

Good riddance to bad trash, as her aunt sometimes liked to say.

The one thing that soured her mood was the fact that, as she slipped the paper back onto her father’s breakfast and pulled out her phone to check the news on PHO, there was not only _one_ , but _several_ threads, all detailing the rumored sightings of Capes that had most recently been seen on the other side of the Atlantic ocean.

Specifically, _Gesellschaft_ capes. Also known as “literal Nazis, not just Neo-Nazis”. The kind that were usually talked about as having fought some army or another in their never ending political quest to take over Germany again and create the Fourth Reich or some shit.

Dinah had a creeping feeling that, whatever was going to be happening in the city within the next few weeks… it wasn’t gonna be good.

Maybe it was the ever present looming dread that the city seemed to have taken on- not just its usual air of malaise and downtrodden despair that came from decades of anomalously high amounts of villainous parahuman activity and the city’s slow, aching economic death in the face of its lack of marketability and lack of shipping revenue, but rather a kind of dread that was much more immediate and sharp, the stink of fear and panic that lanced through the heart, wondering if the vicious beast tearing apart one’s enemies would soon turn on them instead.

Or as Dinah would say, everyone was wondering if Phantom would start just murdering random people in the streets like some kind of fucked up serial killer instead of being the slightly less morally reprehensible course of action of being a (much more terrifying) modern day BJ Blazkowicz.

(No, Dinah was _not_ that much of a gaming history nerd, but considering Wolfenstein was apparently super popular in most arcades in the non-Empire owned sections of town for _extremely obvious reasons,_ she’d be an idiot to not know at least _something_ about it.)

The analogy sorta fell apart considering that Phantom wasn’t trying to _escape_ a Nazi base and they were assassinating them by the truckload rather than doing the 80s action hero thing of gunning them down in droves using an improbably large machine gun whilst shirtless and covered in a sheen of sweat as their only armor, but then again- Dead Nazis.

Dinah wasn’t about to argue with that.

  
As she slipped out of the kitchen to get ready for school, Dinah shoved her phone back into her pocket, pretended like she hadn’t just heard her parents being too engrossed in some kind of idiotic idea of fleeing the city to notice her eating breakfast, and _sighed._ All this stress was going to give her a headache.


	12. 1.12

##  1.12 Afrarchaea Ngomensis 

If anyone were to ask Tammi if she regretted the things she’d done as a member of the Empire, she’d usually tell them to fuck right off. In the case of Miss Militia or Armsmaster, she’d tell them yes, she definitely regretted every last action and that she was working hard to unlearn all the horrible, terrible things that the Empire had ingrained into her impressionable teenage mind. In the case of her parents, it would have been an impassioned sobbing and a flood of apologies, decrying her role in the Empire and begging them to take her back after her string of mistakes. In the case of the few people she could actually tolerate in the Empire that weren’t horny jackoffs or fucking losers, she’d of course tell them  _ fucking no _ , because she wasn’t an idiot and didn’t want to have to try to explain herself to goddamn idiot Neo-Nazis.

In the case of one Sophia Hess, Tammi would simply raise a middle finger, roll her eyes, and go back to whatever it was she was doing before and pretend very hard that she wasn’t interested in befriending the one Ward who didn’t give a shit about holding back against the other side and wasn’t an insufferable goody two shoes who pretended they were living in a world that worked on the rules of a saturday morning cartoon. Fucking losers. (Vista was surprisingly cool, though, for an angry twelve year old).

Tammi was well aware that she was a shit person. Tammi was also well aware of the creeping, unstoppable dread that seemed to mar every day she spent under the Protectorate’s witness protection program.

Tammi was well fucking aware of the fact that she was living on borrowed time and that either the Empire, Gesellschaft, or the  _ goddamn motherfucking Phantom _ was going to come after her ass at any one point in time if she didn’t get out of this shithole of a city, and she knew damn well that the Protectorate was either powerless to stop them, or too fucking stupid and/or self centered to actually put forth a concerted effort into protecting a barely reformed teenaged former Neo-Nazi, even if said teenage Neo-Nazi was capable of flinging cars around with telekinesis.

(That Neo-Nazi was her, in case it wasn’t clear)

Still, there wasn’t much she could do except hope to god that whatever drove Phantom’s rampage left the black clad murderhobo with enough reason (or at least, enough  _ morality) _ to not assault the one bastion of heroism left in the city sized shitheap that was Brockton Bay just for a  _ chance _ at killing Tammi in her sleep. She couldn’t run away without immediately getting arrested and dunked in M/S confinement, she couldn’t go outside for fear of that crazy murderous cape sniping her from across the goddamn bay somehow even through a fucking forcefield, she couldn’t access most of the internet for fear that she might do some stupid bullshit and try to contact the Empire and beg for forgiveness from Kaiser- just about the only thing she  _ could _ do was read from a small selection of books that were pre-approved for her perusal, do whatever schoolwork that the bastards handling her case decided was important for her to keep up with, and maybe, just maybe, occasionally hang out with the Wards in a manner that was clearly an extremely transparent attempt at getting her to reform herself.

(It was  _ kind of  _ working, but it wasn’t like she was about to tell anyone that.)

Well, that, and she could watch the news.

And the news was- well.

Honestly it was mostly just horrifying. 

Tammi chewed her thumb as she rolled over in bed, scrolling through the few social media feeds she still had access to and trying not to throw up as she saw post after post of new Empire corpses being found all over the city, day by day by day. She wasn’t  _ entirely  _ surprised that the E88 had so many guys in all tiers of society, but the fact of the matter was that she’d never interacted with anyone below the hundred or so guys handling their own sectioned off districts across the majority of the downtown area. That there were  _ still _ lower level gangbangers, drug runners, and general hoodlums being assassinated even after a month and a half-  _ fuck _ .

And by this point, all the new capes that the Empire was gaining from the constant stress of Phantom assassinating them, murdering them, killing them all even in broad daylight…

Well. They were dying too.

Some of them in running battles as the black clad assassin struggled against capes with powersets that seemed to be conveniently the exact counter to at least one or two of Phantom’s known traits. Some of them just disappearing and being found the next day crucified against a streetlight.

But all of them were dying. Thankfully (or, really, not so thankfully) none of them were the Empire’s “upper management” as it were. Tammi felt…  _ some _ relief, in a small part of her that her therapist would no doubt say shouldn’t be there, that she didn’t have to see her previous coworkers’ desecrated corpses, but at the same time- the city was a chaotic shitheap at the best of times, and with the Empire being driven back into barely a quarter of what it had been at the start of January… well. There were smatterings of new gangs coming in, fighting each other, remnants of the Empire splintering off. Rumors of Boston gangs taking the short ride up and trying to establish a foothold. The ABB pushing out from the docks, the Merchants oozing up from the dregs…

The city was a powder keg ready to blow, and every day that Phantom continued their reckless crusade, just added fuel to that inevitable fire.

And all Tammi could do was wait for that stuck up Halbeard to finalize her case and either send her to juvie, transfer her across the country, or force her into the fray against her own goddamn (former) friends and coworkers.

Sleep came fitfully to her these days. The stress was starting to get to her.

It was getting to a lot of people, all things considered. But still, in Tammi’s case, she had an actual reason for being stressed, for sticking to the brightest, most well lit areas she could. After all, she used to be part of the Empire, and whaddaya know, there’s a fucking  _ crazed ninja serial killer _ murdering every single person with ties to that fucking gang!

“Shit!” she hissed, gritting her teeth as she slammed her PRT issued laptop closed, trembling a bit as she tried her utmost best to not throw up- why she kept trawling PHO for news on Phantom every goddamn day when she knew damn well that the only thing she’d find would be more corpses of people she once knew, or had met passingly was beyond her, but she couldn’t stop, no matter how sick it made her.

Thank every fucking god that didn’t exist that PHO had strict content restrictions. If she’d had to see what had actually happened to the capes in the Empire, she would have  _ actually _ thrown up.

“Fucking shit, this is  _ insane _ ,” she continued muttering, pacing slowly around her room and worrying her thumbnail between her teeth, heedless of the fact that it was already bitten short and red from irritation. “Christ on a cross, how the fuck do these Protectorate shitheads think that bastard  _ won’t _ come after me?”

She paced and paced, trembling as her thoughts spiraled down and down and down- Most of the Empire’s cape roster was gone to the point that the gang itself was barely seen past a small scattering of neighborhoods around the richer parts of town- and even then, only barely.

Everyone she’d known during her time in the Empire, gone. Hookwolf had disappeared, his last position having been identified by a ridiculous amount of structural damage in an old steel refinery on the outskirts of Brockton. Cricket, throat blown out by a high caliber sniper round. Fenja and Menja, dead in their beds. Alabaster-well, there were rumors about Phantom burying him alive in a pool of concrete. Crusader, shot in the head in the middle of the night.

And now, the only ones left were Kaiser himself, Krieg, Purity, Night, and Fog.

And her.

Tammi felt a cold chill run down her spine as the lights in her room (cell, more accurately) flickered.

They weren’t supposed to flicker.

The room wasn’t supposed to be so cold.

She turned around slowly, breath misting in the air around her, heart beating a thousand times in the short time it took for her to turn and see…

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

The room was normal. There was no mist, there was no chill. The lights didn’t flicker. There was no one else in the room. There had never been anyone else in the room.

But then-

Tammi froze as a whisper of movement brushed along the back of her neck. She looked down, heart sinking into the ground with dread.

If no one else had been there, if it had just been her imagination…

Then why, why, could she see strands of freshly cut hair fluttering to the ground?

Tammi shuddered, her vision becoming hazy and the air growing thick and soupy around her.

There was a knife on her desk.

There was a  _ knife _ on her  _ desk. _

She threw up.


End file.
